Integrating the four skills, connecting linguistic input

When the skills of listening, speaking, writing and reading all come together it is essential for students to know how to handle and take control. These skills go hand in hand; when a student is in class listening to his/her teacher discuss a new topic the student is integrating many of the skills together. The student is listening to the teacher’s new ideas, writing down notes, reading the notes that the teacher is putting on the board and speaking when discussing or asking questions about the topic. This seems so natural for us learners after years of going to class and sitting through lectures but to students new to the English language this can be a daunting task that may make them anxious. This is why we as future teachers have to give these students the resources they need to make whole language learning as non-threatening as we can. By taking the fundamentals of task based instruction or theme based instruction the focus is on the purposes of language. Task based instruction particularly integrates whole language with real world situations; this makes the task seem purposeful and applicable to their lives and make integrating skills easier. Integration is imperative to learners but we have to remember it’s not as easy as we think it is. Integrating listening, speaking, writing and reading was something my teachers had us work on in grade school but they did it in a nonthreatening and at a comfortable pace. Integrating the four skills is another example of how teachers have to be thoughtful and cautious when developing a lesson.

Cohesion is key when communicating because when speaking to others you are always connecting exchanges, even if you are not aware. When communicating you are always thinking about how to relate to the input, how to respond linguistically and how to carry the conversation forward. If the conversation is not unified between the parties then there is no purpose. Culture plays a big role in this as well. If the people conversing do not have anything in common socially, culturally, politically, or ideologically it would be extremely hard to carry on a conversation. Context and input go hand in hand, if the language input is out of the norm or one of the parties has no perspective on the subject the conversation seems useless. 

Teaching Reading and Writing

Teaching Reading and Writing

These Brown chapters give us many strategies, characteristics, and principals for teaching reading and writing to second language learners. As we saw last week in teaching listening and speaking to second language learners, there were many similarities between reading and writing but also many important differences between the two. Reading and writing share some of the same characteristics, but are applied differently. We process the two skills differently and it is important for teachers to tap that into their students and provide enough support to facilitate the second language learners. Both skills have the same characteristics; performance, production/processing time, distance, orthography, complexity, vocabulary and formality. The difference between reading and writing for all of these characteristics is the fact that writers form and produce their own language for other readers to process and digest. This can be a frightening task for some students and they may feel vulnerable when others read their work. As future teachers we have to be there to support and teach our students that it is a positive thing to express themselves through writing and that they will become better writers and readers for doing so.

These chapters touch on some principals and strategies for both reading and writing. Some of the principals I thought were helpful in teaching English to a second language learner was again to use intrinsic motivation, include bottom up and top down techniques to keep reiterating the fundamentals, tap into the students schema, connect reading and writing and provide as much authentic language as possible whether it is assigning a writing or reading.

Assessing reading and writing are two different tasks. For assessing reading a teacher can either have the student read out loud or have a closed (multiplication, fill in the blank, etc.) type of test. Writing is much different in assessing. There is much more to assess in writing because there are so many variables and different things to incorporate. Teachers can use checklists on content, organization, discourse, syntax, vocabulary and mechanics to assess writing. 

Week 8:Teaching Listening, Speaking and Facilitating Interaction

Teaching Listening, Speaking and Facilitating Interaction

Listening comprehension is essential to language learning, and teachers must take a lot into consideration when teaching listening. Before actually presenting information to their students teachers have to ask themselves some questions; what makes a good language learner? What are good listeners doing while listening? What are some listening techniques? By knowing the answers to these questions teachers are one step closer to teaching quality listening skills to their students. First we have to realize that there are different types of spoken language and our listening skills alter depending on what the speech is. Our listening changes dramatically from when we are listening to a monologue, interpersonal or transactional dialogue. We as speakers and listeners would react and listen differently to the three examples and this can be difficult for new language learners. Our language can be very difficult to learn because it can be difficult to understand. In the English language we have concepts like idioms, slang, redundancy, clustering, reduced forms, sentence fragments, performance variables, and the list goes on. It can be intimidating going into language learning so teachers have to guide their students and help them feel less overwhelmed. By including an integrated skills course into the curriculum students will receive special, separate instruction on all four skills which will help the student organize the language better. Teachers should also use authentic language and contexts to help their students recognize patterns in real world language to help with communication. Using intrinsic motivation can also help the students focus on the language they are learning.

It is interesting that the difficulties that were listed in listening are also difficulties in speaking. This raises a huge red flag for me; these are vastly important areas to be aware of as a teacher and to guide language learners through. Teaching speaking is a big job because there are so many contexts of speaking and depending on how you speak in these contexts it might not be appropriate. There are six types of classroom speaking performances, and that is just classroom speech. The relationship between listening and speaking go hand in hand and this is apparent in these two Brown chapters. I have learned that teaching intrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, giving appropriate feedback and using authentic language are key in teaching both listening and speaking.

 “One of the aspects of learning to talk in an L2 is talking to learn.” This is a great start to this chapter because dialogue provides a learner to practice speaking and learning listening, communicating and speaking skills. This is why input as well as output is essential to language learning. Also, learners have to participate in their own language development and be totally invested in it. Without investing in language